Saturday, November 20, 2010
Money/Wealth in America
This week in class we talked about money and wealth in American society. We mainly focused on the fact that these things are not evenly distributed in America. This was something I suspected although, not to this degree. The fact that the top 10% of society has 72% of the wealth baffled me. Not only that but the top 1% of Americans owns 37% of the nations entire private wealth is ridiculous. According to this the top 1% has more wealth than the bottom 90%. I'd heard the phrase "The rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer" before but I did not know the rich were getting richer at such fast rate. And although these statistics may be shocking and may anger people, what are we supposed to do? We cannot just put shame on the people that have all of this money because a lot of them have earned it by working hard and applying themselves. Granted a lot of them have also just been born into such lives of luxury but we can't just take their money and distribute it more evenly, that wouldn't be right. These statistics are the consequences of a capitalistic nation and it is up to the people with the extraordinary amounts of wealth to decide on whether or not to donate a part of their money to charity.
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Richard,
ReplyDeleteI like this idea. I call it "responsible capitalism". This is very much the idea that evolved with early capitalism and the protestant work ethic. The idea was that you made money and invested in making society a better place: donate to universities, the poor, museums, etc...You see this with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, but you don't see it as much as in years past. But I don't want our lesson to be about how the wealth needs to be redistributed, instead, I want class to realize that we are lucky for what we have but we often don't realize all that we have and secondly I want the lesson to be that America does have social classes and these classes determine your opportunities. That is the reality even though most Americans don't like it.